Commander and Jedi Master Luke Skywalker straightened up as he heard the sound of footsteps walking to the door. Belatedly, he wondered if the zipper on his pants was undone.

One of the newer apprentices, a suave-looking teenage boy, opened the door and stood in the doorway with a disinterested air. "Look, man, we're the New Sith."

"Um, yes. I know."

"Meaning we already have a religion. So you can just take whatever flimsiplast you're going to hand me about the Cosmic Being or that Director guy the Lucasites believe in or whatever and you can shove it up your-"

"Chad!" The apprentice's head jerked forward as the back of it was slapped hard by Darth Witicca. "You idiot, he's no religious wacko, this is Commander Skywalker."

The boy's jaded- and somewhat pained, because of the slap upside the head- expression slipped as he gaped at Luke. "What? Oh my god, man, I'm so sorry-"

"Yeah, you will be once I tell Master Bane," Witicca cut him off. "Get your ass inside and help Jaina and Torturian clean up dinner. I'll deal with you later." To Luke, he nodded pleasantly. "Sorry about him. Born with a solid platinum spoon in his mouth, and now we're giving him Force training. Hell of a combination, right? Anyway, Bane will be ready in a few minutes. You can wait inside."

From the lumpy, probably secondhand couch where he was perched, in the dark, den-like area near the cavernous kitchen, which seemed to function as a general "man-cave" area for the masters, Luke looked at the New Sith Order, and the New Sith Order looked back at him. Jaina and Witicca gave him friendly smiles, Apathian glowered (although, to be fair, Luke had heard that Darth Apathian did not approve of anything very much), and most of the masters and older apprentices (those who'd chosen their Sith names already), plus Chad, were smirking at each other or at him. There seemed to be a communal joke going on, which he was not privy to, and was probably the butt of.

At last, one of them- Darth Torturian, possibly; the young man wore cheap synthetic leather pants, man-jewelry, and way too much hair product- asked bluntly, "Are you and Master Bane gonna bang each other?"

"Uh…" The one thing Luke had never expected to discuss with a Sith was his love life. "No," he replied after mentally getting his bearings. "This is a…professional meeting on neutral turf. Nobody has been more adamant about that than your master."

"That's right," Bane intoned, coming down the stairwell behind them, her voice projecting ahead of her. Luke started, and hoped she didn't notice. She was wearing a dark red and black dress that was totally different- and involved much less fabric- than anything he had ever seen her in before, plus a pair of very tight, very high-heeled black boots that had definitely not been made by Sand People. She was also wearing enough silver Tusken jewelry to melt down and plate a small cruiser with. Her eye makeup was just as thick as usual, but, Luke felt, more carefully applied.

"This," announced Darth Bane emphatically, "is definitely not a date."

"I don't think I believe you," he said later. He looked down into his drink as he said it, realizing it was a remark likely to be perceived as confrontational. It had occurred to him that Darth Bane thrived on confrontation the way most people thrived on oxygen.

So far tonight, she had gotten plenty. The restaurant he had scheduled them at was new and upscale, just off the Lipartian way, and according to Bane, it was strictly for yuppies and the nouveau rich. The restaurant, for its part, seemed to reciprocate her feelings. The tall, slender hostess in perfectly blended makeup had smiled coyly at Luke, but had looked Bane over with a quizzical eye. As she showed them to their table after dithering over their possibly lost reservation, Bane had bent close and hissed, in a stage whisper (she did not seem to do anything quietly), "What a bitch. Probably thinks anyone not wearing designer crap shouldn't be allowed in. And I hope she doesn't turn sideways, or we'll lose sight of her and never find the table."

The Sith Lady's mood had only soured further when she learned that White Banthas were not on the cocktail drinks menu. Now she was nursing a half-glass of wine as if she had a grudge against it, and glaring at him. "Why the hell would I lie about it? Do you think it's helping my Order's credibility, to go to the Senate and go, 'oh yeah, we found a flesh-eating vampire Sith ghost on Anzat, and now she's going to be staying in our basement'? How the hell would that as a lie help us in any way?"

"It's not that I don't believe you, exactly," said Luke in what he hoped was a placating tone. "But Bane, I've done my own research on this. I mean, do you think after my father…do you think I'm not interested in what happens after we die? But all the Jedi sources I've heard say that there is a very specific skill to keeping one's consciousness intact after death, and it doesn't involve…consumption of anything." He paused. "Besides…it involves the living Force."

"So because she's a Sith, you think the living Force is…what? Off-limits?"

"Well, how can you be focused on yourself and simultaneously on all life in the universe?"

"Because I'm alive. So all life in the universe is connected to me." He looked up at her, taken aback. The answer came with almost none of her usual attitude- she had just rattled it off, as if for her it was knowledge so basic that she hardly ever thought about it.

She shrugged at his reaction. "Well, it's true. The living Force- all the Force, actually- it isn't something outside us that we have to sacrifice our lives in service of. It's something we already do serve, with every breath we take. And, apparently, beyond our last breath. The Force isn't on the Jedi's side, Skywalker, any more than it's on the Sith's side. The Force is life; it's on everyone's side. It doesn't care what we do."

"Then why should it matter what we do?"

"Because what we do affects other people."

"But if the Force doesn't care about them, then why should we?"

She laughed disbelievingly. "You mean you don't know? You actually need some grand metaphysical reason to care about other people?"

Luke wanted to say, of course not; that's not what I meant. But the words couldn't organize themselves into a coherent phrase in his head. Instead, he said, "I never thought a Sith would lecture me about my lack of empathy."

"If you'd stop letting what Jedi party line you've been able to salvage from my father's iconoclasm do your thinking for you, you'd understand that all this makes perfect sense."

"Well, apparently I do do that, so please explain it to me."

She sat back. "The Sith have always ribbed the Jedi about doing things the same way for millions of years on end, no matter how redundant the policy gets. Now, that's what the Sith are doing. If we're going to survive, we have to either go back into hiding, which I doubt we can do because I don't think the Jedi- namely you- are quite dumb enough to get fooled again, or…we have to make it so you can't get rid of us. So you don't even want to. We have to be…useful. We have to be something good in society."

She shook her head. "I mean, you could kill us all now, but the thing is, you'll always let one of us slip by. And then in another few hundred years, we'll have another Jedi purge, but we'll let one of you slip by accidentally, because that's just how it goes, and then a millennium later we'll be sitting here, talking this all out all over again. And each time, people will die and lives will be wasted and galactic society will come that much closer to total destruction, just so that a few men on either side can gratify- or preserve- their egos."

"So it's better to abandon power than to have it at that cost."

"No. And you sound disapproving."

"No, just…surprised. So how will you get power now?"

"We'll get the non-political kind. We'll study the Force. And as for the political kind…we'll spread it around." She smiled at him. "See, you've learned that power is like energy- once you lose it, you can't get more, and what you lose is wasted. It's not like that at all. When one person has less power, everyone has more."

"Some people are more powerful than others. That's a basic fact. And it's up to those people to-"

"Is it a fact? Are all the powerful people you've ever known Force-users? And how can you know who the Force-users are? Now that we've seen the tests are flawed, however minutely, I don't think you can." She sipped the wine and made a face at its apparent bitterness. "The line is thin, Skywalker. That's the thing I love most about this transition back to Republicanism. All the lines are getting thin. Between rulers and subjects, powerful and powerless, known and unknown, fact and myth, light and darkness, good and evil, even healthy and sick…do you remember that girl with the Krandyn's I was talking to Leia about that day? She found that Cody boy, the clone. And she and Cody talked Bane the First into coming quietly. A deficient clone and a disabled girl. And half the time, Bane the First'll only talk to them."

"I still don't understand what this Darth Bane the First has to do with the Jedi Temple, and with the clone-"

"It's not that complicated," she said impatiently. "Sidious- and probably generations of Sith before him- had been finding her victims to sustain her corporeal existence- she maintains her consciousness through her own power, but she needs blood and living tissue to take physical form. As for motivation, I would guess they were awed by her, and probably afraid of her, too. Cody was a wreck when I first talked to him about her. But she'd taken up residence in the Temple- probably because it's become a center of the Force- and Sidious was bringing her deficient troopers, people on death row, political rivals. She killed the two troopers with Cody, but not him because she sensed his Force abilities-"

"Which it shouldn't be possible for him to have-"

"Yeah, but he does have them. Hell, it's impossible that there should be any serious variation in clones' personalities and physiology at all, but it happens all the time. According to Cody, there's been at least one with severe Krandyn's Disorder, too. Now let me finish. She sensed his talents, and took him on as this kind of servant-apprentice thing, until we found him. She has multiple lairs on planets like Anzat and Tatooine, where there were local people with mythologies she could adapt to suit her needs. She probably has a lair of some kind of Korriban, too. That's basically the Sith homeworld."

"And now she has one in your basement."

"We felt it would be best. We can keep an eye on her. And she might enjoy being around us, which could make her less homicidal, and she might have things to teach the apprentices. We'll see."

"Can I meet her?"

"If she'll see you. We'll raise it with her. She doesn't like being disturbed, but I think we can persuade her to meet you and Leia."

"Thank you."

Luke fidgeted, and she saw. "What the hell's wrong now?"

"Nothing. I had a question."

"Okay."

"Did Vader ever mention me or our mother to you?" It shot out of him so rapidly that he suddenly realized how much he had been wondering about it.

The dull roar of restaurant sounds seemed to fade around them. Bane looked down at her lap. "Just a few times. He thought you were dead. It's… actually why he and I were so close, I think. One of the reasons, anyway."

Luke looked down, too, into his drink. Then he asked, "What was it like, having him for a father?"

"He was a good man. Nobody believes me when I say that, but it's true." She looked up at him, all traces of laughter and even irony gone from her face. Instead, there was grief, like an exposed wound. "You didn't believe me when I said it. When we first met, right before Endor."

I should have tried harder to believe it. Aloud, he said, "Actually, I didn't mean…my father. I meant…yours."

"What was it like being the daughter of Emperor Palpatine?"

"Yes."

"Crappy." She seemed glad of the change in subject. "I had no actual power because he never named me as his heir. He uprooted me from my Tribe, and pretty clearly never gave a damn about my well-being. For a while, he used me to project this media image of himself as a father…a sentimental man. But then adolescence hit me like a ton of duracrete and I got too sarcastic. So he started sending me off to all these prep schools, which was how I met your sister, and eventually…I was able to get out. I faked my death; Dack and Leia helped. As far as Palpatine was concerned I was legally dead, and so no longer his problem, and so I went back home, visited my family, and found the New Sith Guild…I always felt bad about leaving Lord Vader behind. But he once told me he wanted me to get out. Away from Palpatine. He was under his thumb, but he still knew what that guy had done. A lot of people knew."

During the lull in the conversation, their food came. Luke reflected that Bane looked somehow softer and almost totally sane in the warm golden light of the restaurant booth. As she cut up her food, her bangles and wristbands clanked together gently; her shoulder-length earrings made faint clinking sounds. Her movements were surprisingly graceful and deft, and for a moment, he could see her as a royal in an Emperor's court.

"How is your brother?" he asked. "Triclops?"

"He's all right. The new medication seems to be working well, but, you know, that's what we thought about the last stuff." She shook her head, causing her earrings to clink more insistently. "And I told him he's got to change his name to something that doesn't sound like a monster from a Dathomirian folk legend, but he hasn't gotten around to it yet. And of course the facility is pitching all sorts of fits over it, because they'll have to alter all the paperwork in his file to whatever his new name will be." She paused and then remarked, "You should bother Ken to get down there and visit him. He says he hasn't seen him in two months."

"Maybe his sense of time is just-"

"No, his sense of time has always been totally unaffected by…whatever he has. And I checked the visitor's log, anyway, and he's right." Her white nostrils flared angrily. "You know, I understand now why Gaya Viviani's parents were so paranoid when they told me about the Krandyn's. Once you label someone, it's like they cease to be an actual person, an adult, an equal. To the system…to other people…they become this kind of…perpetual child. Not trusted, or believed." She was glaring at him again. "My brother has a mental illness, but he's still a grown man. And a father. He deserves to see his son."

Luke tried again to say something to soothe her temper. "I know that, Bane, of course I know. I'll talk to Ken about it. And I don't think your brother is a child just because he's sick." He paused to swallow a bite. "And by the way, if I understand Krandyn's Disorder correctly, there's a world of difference between what Gaya Viviani has and what your brother's issues are."

"Only in a medical sense," she snapped, and they didn't speak again until the walk back to the Corridor. Although he didn't understand what she meant, he didn't press her further.